Stan Brakhage Movies

The following films were all made in 1976. I do not wish to describe them. —SB "Two portrait sketches and two nondescript."

This film begins with points of light defining a dark space out of which a female dancer (Vivienne Palmer) emerges dressed in a semi-transparent...

A hand-painted double-frame printed film which begins with textures reminiscent of a gray shag rug that is fretted by green and golden...

“Faust Part 2” reveals the modern Faust in a romantic interlude, an idyll (from the Greek idein, "to see"); also, a journey of the id. A...

It was while studying this film that I decided to group these ‘romans’ under the title Roman Numeral Series and to give up the term...

Begins with brown light thru quartz crystal, ends with a candle wick burning, circled by boiling gold flecks.

This is a film inspired by Gertrude Stein's "Stanzas In Meditation", in which the filmmaker has edited a meditative series of images of landscapes...

To the child mind, the transformative sacrificial power of "O, Lamb of God" is a daily manifestation - not as an adult shift-of-interest, but rather...

“With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set...

OPEN FIELD is in the mind, of course, and exists as a weave of trees, grasses, waters, and bodies poised and fleeting at childhood's end. The scene...

In this haunting but lyrical meditation on war, Brakhage intercuts 8-mm footage of Colorado with imagery from WWII newsreels. He responds to the...

“With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set...

This is the twelfth film in the twenty-part Arabics series. Brakhage creates blurry visual fields that are profoundly without ground, worlds of...

This way madness - or experimental filmmaking - lies. A solitary man in coat and tie enters an apartment. It's midnight. He appears agitated and...

LOVESONG 2 is a rapid recapitulation of the tactics of Lovesong, without the multiple rhythms of variable step-printing: it is a straight...

This film of single-strand photography begins with the "fire" of reflective light on water and on the barest inferences of a ship. Throughout, the...

A man is supine on a mountain side. Images rush past of nature and a stained glass saint. An infant is born. We see a lactating nipple. Images...

This is a hand-painted work which involves a variety of colors applied within gouged and scratched shapes which approximate both swift shifts of...

This film, a combination of hand-painting and photography, is a fulsome exposition of the themes of DOG STAR MAN. In that early epic I had envisioned...

Peripheral envisionment of daily life as the mind has it - i.e., a terrifying ecstasy of (hand-painted) synapting nerve ends back-firing from...